Image to Pixel Art

Pixel art has a distinct look that sets it apart from smooth photography and vector graphics. The chunky square pixels, the limited palette, the visible grid structure. It is a style that carries a lot of personality and works equally well for game assets, social media avatars, sticker designs, and creative projects. What used to require dedicated pixel editing software can now be done with any image you already have.

This tool converts your photos and images into pixel art right in the browser. You control the pixel size, color palette, and adjustments like brightness and contrast, so the end result reflects the style you are actually going for rather than a generic automated output.

the three controls that define the output

Most of the work in getting a good result comes down to three settings, and understanding what each one actually does saves a lot of back-and-forth.

Pixel block size is the most important one. It controls how many pixels from the original image get collapsed into a single square block. A small block size — 4 to 8px — keeps more detail from the original and produces something that looks like a detailed sprite. A larger block size, 16px or higher, makes the result coarser and more abstract, closer to what you'd see in very early 8-bit games. For most portrait photos, somewhere between 8 and 12px hits the sweet spot where you can still tell what it is while it clearly reads as pixel art.

Color palette is what separates pixel art from a pixelated photo. Applying a palette restricts the output to a fixed set of colors, which is the thing that gives pixel art its authentic retro look. The built-in palettes range from 2-color monochrome up to 64-color sets. Without a palette applied, the output uses the full color range of the original image — it'll be pixelated, but it won't really feel like pixel art.

Brightness, contrast, and saturation adjust the source image before the pixelation runs. Boosting contrast before converting often produces sharper, more readable results — especially when you're working with a limited palette. If colors are coming out muddy or hard to distinguish, raising the contrast first usually fixes it.

Lospec palettes and what they unlock

Lospec.com is a community-maintained database of color palettes used by pixel artists and game developers. It includes historically accurate palettes — the original NES palette (54 colors), Game Boy (4 shades of green), CGA (16 colors) — alongside hundreds of community-created sets covering everything from muted pastels to high-contrast neons.

This tool lets you paste a Lospec palette URL or import a .hex file directly. The colors load into the palette selector and constrain the output to that exact set. The practical effect is significant: using a palette like the original Game Boy green or the NES set is the difference between something that looks like a filtered photo and something that looks like it was made for a game cartridge from 1989.

If you're building assets for a specific game engine or art project that targets a particular aesthetic, matching the palette exactly keeps everything visually consistent across every asset you produce. It's the kind of constraint that actually makes the creative work easier rather than harder.

which download size to use

There are two download options and they serve different purposes.

Small download saves the image at the actual pixel grid dimensions. If your source image was 800px wide and you used a block size of 16px, the output file is 50px wide — one pixel per block. This is the true pixel art size, and it's what you want if you're using the image as a game sprite where each pixel renders at 1:1 on screen.

Large download scales that small version back up to the original image dimensions using nearest-neighbor scaling, which means no blurring, no anti-aliasing, just hard pixel edges. This is what most people actually want. It looks sharp and large enough to see clearly, and it's suitable for social media avatars, profile pictures, stickers, and thumbnails without any additional resizing on your end.

For print use, go with the large download and a small pixel block size. A smaller block size means more pixels in the output grid, which when scaled back up gives you a higher-resolution file that holds up at larger print dimensions. Input formats accepted: JPG, PNG, WEBP, GIF, BMP. Output is always PNG — lossless, sharp pixel edges, no compression artifacts at block boundaries.